Also, see "Moreau's Other Island" by Brian Aldiss, an updated version of the classic. I found H.G.Wells writing to be very dated, not that Aldiss is current (published 1980) but I think it is biologically more plausible..
Oddly enough, I happen to be reading this book right now (though my edition is titled "An Island Called Moreau"). I had just finished re-reading Wells and Silvia Moreno Garcia's "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau" (a re-telling of the story set in colonial Mexico), and thought I'd try Aldiss's version. I am still trying to decide if he wrote it as a satire or not.
They are referring to how there’s a belief in some parts of Massachusetts that the police are trying to frame Karen Reid for the death of John O Keefe (0). At its climax it was all over the news, it was discussed at a lot of water coolers, and there were even billboards bought by the highway to show support and draw attention to the court case.
The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and jarring; step counts, battery temperature, automobile software, Ring cameras...wow.
Railroading is essentially coercing/bullying someone into a situation or doing something with a connotation of things being taken too far, very quickly, using overwhelming force… like a train.
The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.
The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?
I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.
first consumer device I ever saw was the Microwriter, back in the 1980's .. but court stenographers have been using chorded keyboards for a century or more
My information may be a little out of date, but in Bluetooth there was two types of audio. There is isochronous streaming (Headset profile) and audio streaming (Audio Profile). The Headset profile is bidirectional and time-sensitive (packets will be dropped if they take too long), it was designed for headsets as per its name ("communication device") rather than the Audio profile which, although it can be a source or a sink is basically for streaming, where the audio is not time-sensitive as such.
So yeah, the isochronous streaming mode is much lower bit rate but thats probably why Windows sets it as a communications device, because it needs that mode.
Its difficult to know exactly, but I use a Logitech Zone Vibe 125 headphones with microphone and find it works fine for phone calls and listening to audio. However, I am not an audio nerd and neither are the people I speak to using it. I never had any luck with in-ear devices.
The best you can do these days while keeping to the standard is to use mSBC codec which at least does bidirectional 16bit. It's not too common unfortunately. At least on Linux you can force the codec you want with pipewire. On Mac you just get whatever Apple decides you're allowed.
mSBC is kind of a hack, though. It pushes Bluetooth beyond its specifications and often works, but in my experience it also often causes dropped audio in less than ideal situations (i.e. walking with a Bluetooth headset on).
mSBC is worth a try if you haven't already tried it, but it's not a real solution. Bluetooth LE Audio does provide a fix, but real hardware that supports it is hard to come by.
Not sure how it protects your vision. So, they say take an eye break to relieve the strain, presumably with focussing on a fixed point. These guys are saying that hey you can instantly focus on something far away and carry on working without even looking away from the screen! That doesn't sound like an eye break to me, and it doesn't sound like it protects your vision at all.
I mean, it looks pretty cool but I think their marketing department is not aiming it at my cynical self
I feel like it's likely misleading, too. Eye breaks are about changing your focal plane, and if you're looking beyond the monitor to rest your eyes, you won't be seeing the screen.
You can experience this with a window with dry erase markers. Focus at a far off point and the dry erase is illegible and may not even disturb your far vision. Focus at the glass and you can read whatever you wrote (subject to penmanship).
Heads up displays often have optics to project onto a medium distance focal plane, otherwise your eyes have to work harder and you're not really able to see the scene and the display at the same time.
I've never seen a fishing boat fly a flag, and I've been sailing in many countries for >20 years. Generally, fishermen don't care for such things.
So, since I am British and have a UK registered boat and know a bit about this. The law that applies (The Merchant Shipping Act 1995 section 5) requires that we should fly the flag when entering or leaving a foreign port or upon a signal by one of Her Majestys ships [1]. Flying a flag routinely in international waters is very much not required, and very few vessels fly a flag out there, because there is not much there to look at it and it just flaps itself to bits.
That sounds very much like a cultural thing. Here in the Sound (the strait between Denmark and Sweden), the norm is definitively to fly a flag with so many different nationalities sailing here. In Sweden it is also required (through not punishable) to carry a flag if you are around the port, when in visible range of the coast guard, when in foreign waters, and when in visible range of other ships in international waters. The only exceptions to those requirements is participation during sports events.
With the trouble brewing with the Russian shadow fleet in the Baltics, flying a flag seem quite important unless you want the coast guard to stop you (they have also increased their presence significant the last 5-10 years and do a lot of random checks).
Are shady Russian private military organizations or whatever just completely unable to get their hands on a Norwegian or Finnish or Estonian flag or something?
Who needs stealth when a cheap piece of fabric provides cover.
They seem to be able to more easily acquire flags of convenience from further away, and optionally some kind of nominal insurance from different providers likely to pass muster at a first glance (I have zero maritime expertise and just wanted to add some supplementary context to the parent of your post).
No, that does not solve the issue. You still receive 'reaction' emails but in addition, the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick. They are in some way correct, since they likely did not know they had sent an irritating email but you do.
The truth is, this is just another embrace-extend-extinguish strategy by Microsoft. Their business ethos is, and has been for decades, to make it irritating to use software not written, and controlled, by themselves.
> the user you emailed in the first place gets an irritating email and they suppose that you are a dick
Funny you should say that. I think that people who cause me to recieve an irritating email with nothing more than "like [person] reacted to your message" are dicks. They are sending me an email phrased like there's some third-party intermediary keeping me at arms length e.g. "Mr Blenkinsop wishes it be known that he is aware of your recent correspondance and is approving of its tone."
If you can't fix the real problem - Microsoft and their gamification of email - you can correct the views of people who think that "liking" an email is OK, which to be clear it is not. Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.
You need a similarly hostile user education to stop thoughtless people wasting your time in chat clients -- the moment they say "hello", and then nothing else, send them a link to https://nohello.net/ to let them know they have just been rude and inconsiderate.
> Email is not a chat client. Use words to communicate to people, and if you don't think a "reaction" merits words, then don't send one.
shakes fist at clouds
Seriously, though, this argument seems kind of silly. Do you not usually use words to chat? It’s fine that you don’t like this in your email but your reasoning is specious. “Chat is for emojis. Email is for words.”
Whether I like it or not, it seems that the modern chat client (e.g. Discord or Slack, not IRC) has developed the expectance that you "react" to chat messages as they happen - because there's a mental model that you're literally "chatting" with someone, and not showing you're listening is a faux pas, so the minimum effort response is a "react", especially thumbs-up just to mean "I saw this message and have no further comment on it"
You can of course chat in email, but it's unusual, there's usually a higher bar to responding; it would be madness if every email had everyone else in the chain send another email saying "I've read this", so that's not what people do. I only see "I've read this" emails if the penultimate email concluded the topic and that was all that's left to say. Hence why it's unwelcome to bring the habits of chat clients to email.
I don't think it is specious. Email == electronic mail, if someone sent you a letter you'd not send a reaction back, you'd sent a reply letter. But companies have been trying for years to make email more like a chat app. Threads come to mind. I I prefer folders over tags too.
Sorry, no. You’re trying to carve out some special use case for email as if it’s primary use is formal communication. Email is used for everything from formal business communication to friendly chats to fwd:fwd:fwd: Grandma’s chain letters.
On the other side, text messages are essentially just small emails and your argument against “reactions” applies equally.
We'll have to agree to disagree. For me, and the way I use these things, emails are formal, text/chat is informal. I've never and will never use email like a chat.
If someone was attempting to use email as such with me, they'd likely be getting no reaction at all.
So, its a long game - make it generally irritating for people to use other services. Every time they introduce a feature, make it opaque and difficult to implement. Other services, other MUA's have a hard time keeping up. The users get frustrated that things dont work: "I don't get these stupid emails in Outlook" "LibreOffice doesn't display my document the same" "Firefox doesn't show the page properly" => "Can we just use Outlook/Word/Edge"
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